I like to introduce myself with poems. And a cape. But nobody can see my cape here so just forget I said anything.

It is not malice, that the Gods should reward our prayers with mere images-for they must draw shadow hearts aloft, hearts that must die,hearts that stir in images only, hearts for which no vision at last fulfilled might prove inspiring,and want to glimmer only around the edges of things.It is not malice, that the gods please our hearts and not our souls,unless one speaks to the gods from their soul,and most souls do not pray, and hardly speak at allfor the heart bears no malice.-- PindarPythian III.

If one is to bear malice against the Gods and their cold silence toward our prayers, do so with the soul and bless them with the heart, and if that malice were to speak, one should reserve such speech for music I think.

I was not sure where to place my post, however, considering I have a mix of general and more specific ideas as well as compositions themselves, I landed here.

To be blunt, I'm an extreme isolate, having spent the last 14 years cloistered in my home, unrepentant of my dramatic reclusion, agoraphobia and likely even more extensive pathology while adopting an equally isolating mode of life as far as online interaction is concerned. In that time I have focused on composition a lot and arrived at around 50 or so volumes of compositions, each about 500 pages long, so already, it is a bit of a life's work. I've also arrived at a perhaps- odd personality, or a kind of intensification plainly evinced in my communication, one that naturally comes along with looking inward too incautiously-- one which I ask to be forgiven for in advance, for I now feel compelled to throw a few of these compositions out there as I study the matter and manner of publication, even though, again, I seem to have no sense or talent for social networking or anything of the sort. This appears to be the simplest way of going about it, making a post on Reddit, that is. Of course I can answer questions about those elements of theory I either made use of or simply invented myself for their construction, and the scores are provided as well, as lengthy as some might be.

I mixed the audio with headphones for all of these if that is relevant, I am still learning the audio engineering part which is necessary for me since most of the music I write is symphonic and can't be played by a single person, I must rely on layering audio tracks and on VSTS.

To take elements from baroque, Romantic and modern advanced harmony- from modal theory to jazz, while exceeding the formal dimensions and limitations of all these genres and the respective horizons of meaning characterizing their eras in time and their possible relationship to the Divine, which I take music as representing more than any other art-form, I suppose is my guiding principle,- one very similar to Busoni's ideal of the Young Classicism, or junger Klassizität, which aimed at an interfusion of new harmonic and melodic content drawn from advances in modern theory with old, well evinced and dutifully refined forms drawn from the classical tradition.

I wanted to include a few small pieces first, which reach about 12-15 minutes at their longest. The rubato capriccio is only four minutes in length, it uses a few elements from the old Spanish La Folia cadence, an erotic bit of delicious Italic decadence to balance my usual preoccupation with capturing the more transcendent feelings when it comes to music.

And then two finished larger-scale symphonic works, which are written in a musical form of my own design, the fantasy-symphony/symphonic-fantaisie, which I will make a few notes on at the bottom of this post:

I am formalizing a musical structure around my symphonic-fantasias. There are four 20 minute long movements making up each of them, and each of these four movements is subdivided into 3 movements of its own, or sections really, leaving out recapitulation within the subdivisions in order to establish a ternary formula. The first theme of each movement is a thematic transformation of the one before. So the first theme of the the second movement is a transformation of the theme that started the first. And then in the fourth and last movement, all of these first themes and secondary themes (each second theme is also a transformation of the second theme in the previous movement ) will be combined, arranged, and resolved to one finale. The formal plan is a combination of thematic transformation (Pioneered by Liszt) and recapitulation, ( a staple of the sonata-allegro formalism and the general theory of classical arrangement) the fourth movement serving as a massive recapitulation, as a movement that lends to recapitulation the same weight in the musical argument that the development section possessed formerly. The development section has always had a privileged weight in the literature, because it is process intensive and classical music is obsessed with process, ie. the process of composition and resolution, with introduction and recapitulation having secondary roles.

The obsession with process began with the fugue, later evolving into the sonata-form. In the fugue it is most clearly seen: a melody, weak in itself, (in terms of expressive power) is polyphonically textured: the melody in terms of its introductory role in the three divisions of intro, development, and recap, only serves as a basic germ to be explored by the process of composition itself, an exploratory gesture pointing toward the greater analogical mimesis of the longing of longing itself, the longing for longing itself, Augustine's amor amoris or of the "lover in love with love", the deep excess "which survives in the heart of the saints like the worm in fruit", "the god-struck discontent of which man is truly a son", which draws his face to the stars out of longing, though he only gazes upon the stars because he does not know what to long for-- 1 the melancolia permeating all great works in the search for mankind's relationship to the divine, a golden symbol whose exploration these given works above all represent to us. There is in fact greatness to be found in this attitude toward art. However, in Romantic music, we find melodies with incredible expressive power, a power granted by the further development of chromatic coloration and the incorporation of the full harmonic series and those intervals not made truly available to the artistic imagination in Bach's time when the fugue was in vogue. The further development of harmony led to this unavoidable musical problem: if melody is granted this incredible expressive power, how is a melody to serve the purposes of theme, that is, how is a melody to be incorporated into a larger musical text: the purpose of that musical text, of any musical text, whether its architecture is found in the sonata, fugue, etc. is simply to make the melodies complete by developing and finding their place in a greater whole- if they are already complete in themselves, where do we go with them? These Romantic melodies cannot be developed by fugal writing, they cannot be further incorporated in this way into a larger musical argument. Even the sonata form was eventually abandoned, with Liszt advancing the idea of thematic transformation in his Symphonic poems, though it had precedent in Schuber's Wanderer Fantasy, and in Beethoven's unusually lengthy manner of composition. My new symphonic-fantasia is an attempt to develop a structure that allows such melodies to be developed in the context of a larger musical process once again, while lending equal gravity to recapitulation so as not to get fully absorbed into the development sections, like especially happens in Beethoven's development for the Eroica.

I might bring further light to the function of the symphonic phantasy with this excerpt of Drabkin's, on the subject of Beethoven's Mass.

" It is generally agreed that the music of Beethoven's maturity is among the most highly organized in the repertory of the 18th and 19th centuries, and that the analysis of any work- choral or instrumental- should take into account not only the structure of the individual movements but also the connections between them. Music theory, however, is conventionally concerned with dynamic processes- chord progressions, melodic motion, musical form as movement between regions of instability and stability- and is ill equipped as a theory to determine the conditions under which one can sensibly draw connections between distant points, for example on the basis of thematically similar material. "

It is this later matter I am concerned with, that is, creating thematic linkages between the most distant objects in the given musical structure.

I suppose that fact, combined with my free interfusion of traditions as varied as Romanticism to jazz, would imply simply: I am searching for a new music, a new harmonic and melodic landscape.

1. Irreverent of my intellectual vanity, I was referencing a few of my own works of philosophy and prose here:

To love is to grieve over the loss of something that was never ours. It is a feeling ofseparation and self-estrangement from something nonetheless unknown and that wasnever part of us, a feeling of somehow having finally been made whole by being brokenapart. It represents that state of inspired displicency so characteristic of man, which leaveshim forever the unsatisfied and bereft wanderer of the earth; that state in which thematerial basis of our desires refutes itself by means of the very abundance of itsfulfillment, and in which man grows quite sickened by exhausting his pleasures of theirlast, sweetened drop. The true scope of that unconscious basis from which we are soestranged, the yearning for which all of life is absorbed as by a dim hypnogeny, could notpossibly be circumscribed by any object of our hopes and faith, and no matter how welldeveloped merely human felicity might become, there is consequently a sigh ofmelancholy which must always enliven and animate it, which must pass over and carry it,like the bird's feather tangled in the angel's mane. It is only because he does not knowwhat to yearn for, that man raises his gaze to meet the heavens and yearns for the stars.

What is called reason is not the part of human nature that stands opposed to the animalityof man, it is not properly what makes man something more than a beast. The animalspossess reason as well, they simply reason somewhat poorly. That alone possessed byman is this slight remanence of disassociated longing which survives his extinguishedpleasures here on earth, which raises his head toward the stars; what is called fantasy, ormadness, the god-struck discontent of which he is truly the son. Experience, when it isnot paired with this imaginative capacity, is but memory; and memory, divorced from thesame capacity, is but regret.

This "love for the unknown beloved" has compelled each philosopher, in his own way, tocontribute his own symbol to the generalized mythos of the depth of the soul, the soul'sunconscious intimation of the distant unknown for which it consciously strives. One maycall to mind the incurvatus in se, the turning inward of the Christian soul, the katabasis ofthe Greek myths, or the Platonic vision of Eros. One may call to mind the eternalrecurrence of Nietzsche, in which the soul's untold depth is emptied into an unboundedfuture that has itself been submerged in the past; one may call to mind Kierkegaard's leapof faith, by which the irresolvable tension of the self's underlying agonism and depthtranscends the limitations of synthetic logic by way of heavenly grace; the divine excessof Schelling's freedom, or the Dasein of Heidegger, which reveals the soul's depth bymeans of a timeless confrontation with the external universe. In each such symbol thesoul braves the unknown abyss of itself, choosing to divorce itself from a world in whichit has not been able to empty that depth of its hidden contents and in which it has foundno satisfaction of its displaced yearning. Every philosophy amounts to an enlivening ofthis one basic dream, a kind of reinvention of this fundamental symbol. Yet, in each newsymbol there is brought forth a moment in which the self's orientation with the depth andthe unknown beloved can be altered, a moment in which the production of a newsubjectivity can be attained.

The PDF score you also provide shows how complex this composition is, but I must admit to being more intrigued by how you compose - are you a virtuoso keyboard player or are you using some algorithmic help to flesh things out?

The links I have listened to are really interesting and I can really hear what you're getting at and the direction it is going. I'd be equally interested to hear solo piano performances of the pieces. There would be some good challenges in there and loads of room for performance dynamics, phrasings...much of which I can definitely hear implied but parts sound a bit computer generated - which as a feature is cool.

Anyway, good work. I look forward to hearing about your process too. Not entirely sure what the main question was in the post but I have been enjoying the links!

These links are interesting but take me well out of my comfort zone, capability and experience - maybe no bad thing !I wonder if you have tried to elicit comment/advice from other sources, eg American composers forum :

You should know that there are others here much more qualified and experienced than meto offer advice, but your opening post may have stunned them temporarily ! I hope you find what you are looking for.Regards, John

Hello there! I don’t know what your reasons are for posting here, but I offer a couple of my thoughts after listening to a bit of your music. These are just my opinions, I’m not stating them as “rules”.

Music works best when there is tension and release, no matter its form... what I heard was pretty much all tension. Just something you may want to think about.

The constant swirl of sustaining pad sounds tracking the piano-like sound is not registering to me as symphonic at all, if that is the intent. It just sounds muddy and wearing on the ear. You might consider bringing the pads in and out, or present this as a solo instrument piece. Or actually score it for different instruments... there is a vast pool of interesting traditional and non-traditional sounds to draw from these days, and it’s easy enough to design your own orchestra.

They are labeled as symphonic just on the basis of their incredible harmonic density, the massive harmonies, etc. and the fact that it requires two to three pianists at once to perform.

Indeed release is important, however I think of it in terms unrelated to tonic resolution. In the process of assembling notes for a theoretical book, this one is useful to explain what I mean here:

" Hindemith wanted to go beyond tonality but, like me, he had strong philosophic contention with the atonal serial composers and the manner in which they "went beyond" tonality, for they did so seemingly illegitimately. Hindemith wished to establish a new theory of music that legitimately transcended the limitations of the diatonic functions, that is, a theory of music that didn't analyze chords and harmony in terms of key centers and their relationships. Hindemith's solution was to use a mathematical procedure to break all the chords and scales down to their fundamental intervals, pure intervals which he then classified in terms of their apparent harmony and discord. Because he classified all the possible intervals based on their consonance and dissonance, he could then inter-relate chords into progressions that generated tension and release (musicality) purely on the basis of which intervals they were constructed from, without any reliance on the conventional diatonic system of keys. But his classification of harmony and discord for the intervals is very arbitrary, as is the choice to perform a mathematical reduction down to the level of the interval itself in order to arrive at an analytic basis. I wish to do the same, that is, arrive at an alternative theory to both serial composition and conventional tonality, but I have used this idea of symmetry instead of something along the lines of Hindemith's interval classes, for symmetry represents an objective non-arbitrary basis of comparison and analysis, and is consequently far more robust. Instead of basing the theory of harmony on either interval classes or on the key centers and resolution to their central tonics, the relationship between chords is defined in my system in terms of a grand-scale idea of musical symmetry. The most important symmetrical relationship is found in the Overtone-Undertone series, but the most important symmetry for the practical application to composition and musical analysis is found in the Lydian scale, for, when it is combined with its own symmetrical mirror, the twelve notes of the total chromatic is produced- it is this curious phenomenon which initially clued me in to the idea of a grand musical symmetry invisibly organizing the various scales, a kind of super-scale. Then each possible chord (or scale, or mode, etc.) can similarly be mirrored in terms of tonal gravity and combined with its symmetrical counterpart in the same manner that the Lydian scale was combined with its mirror in order to create the chromatic scale, etc. Essentially, the harmonic relationships are defined in terms of these symmetrical patterns created by combining things with their own mirrors, taking all the resulting notes together and correcting for duplications in each case- these note collections are my replacement for "scales". A corollary of the new theory is: in a normal scale the tone that generates the structure of the scale is itself the tonic or central note that the others resolve to in order to release tension, that is the whole idea of returning to the root, but, within the framework of this symmetrical idea, scales no longer function this way; the note that generates one of these symmetrical relationships (Like Lydian combined with its own mirror to produce the chromatic scale) of notes (the new version of a "scale") is different than the note that they resolve to, the "tonic." Now chords can be related not in terms of diatonic functions, keys, tonics and key centers, but purely in terms of this objective musical symmetry... "

Continuing a little, I also wanted to note: because that form of resolution is not as dramatic as normal tonic resolution, you might have to listen to something several times before you begin to "hear" it, though in exchange for that sensitivity one is granted a far richer field of possible modulations, whereby the extremely distant connections can be established that I spoke of near the bottom of my original post.

I believe you can understand that many people will find your work difficult to 'get' and appreciate (although the good people on this forum are very open to challenging material).

With specific regard to the above link, which I picked after auditioning several of your works, I am impressed with the focus you have put into it. If you wrote this by hand, either in notational form (whether or not of your own devising) then my additional respect for that process.

For certain, this piece (as with several of your others) is internally consistent with itself, and makes for good listening in many ways. The dis/harmonies and overall structure come across to me as pleasing, although in the execution I think your choice of timbre is both good and misjudged. The 'breathy' airiness that accompanies the first sections of the work is to my ears pleasant but distracting and subtracts from the appreciation of the work after some time. This may be a limitation of mine.

Most people have limited attention spans and I do not exclude myself from this. In the absence of an identifiable harmonic theme, as your listener I derive pleasure from your work, but this decreases after a few minutes because I cannot keep up with the intensity of variation, thus my brain 'smooths' it out to an enjoyable but repetitive ensemble (even though I know that it is not strictly repetitive).

Again, this may be a limitation of mine - but a challenge you may face is that listeners who are not you will exhibit the same 'blending' phenomena that I do resulting in a perception, however inaccurate in reality that perception is.

I wish I could hear your work with your ears. It must be an amazing experience and I regret it is denied to me

I think you must be able to appreciate variations in your work that are shrouded to the rest of us in their subtlety. If this is the case, then I wish I had that ability - sadly for me, I do not.

You say:

Parodites wrote:In the fugue it is most clearly seen: a melody, weak in itself

I am not certain whether you refer to the fugue as a musical discipline in itself, or whether to a specific fugue you created. If the first is true, then I must disagree with you. There are many fugues with a strong, bold melody that is then embraced, developed and augmented with subsequent progression. Of course Bach is a master of this.

If you mean the second, then I defer to your judgement because you perceive the work in a way that it is apparent I cannot.

My assumption being that you are a genuine entity, regardless of the above I applaud your work.

I believe strongly you should continue to create. The intensity is beautiful and the world is a better place for having your contribution within it.

I suspect that the input we (I?) provide is not of the nature that you were seeking. If this is the case, please enlighten me/us as to what your intended message is and the nature of any feedback (if, indeed you seek any) you would find useful.

Indeed I was referring to the fugue as a discipline, accepting of course there are exceptions to my comment about fugues having relatively weak melodies. A more general statement could be made: the melody is used only as a tool for exploring the process of process itself, the process of composition itself, in the fugue, whereas the melody is at the center stage in a Romantic era work for example, or modern music.

Aware of its challenging nature, I believe that with some explanation and repeated listening, like all work that was once new and challenging, it will become exponentially easier to intuit connections that are very obvious to me, not because of any superiority of intellect, but simply because I had to listen to these 100 times over while revising them.

It was written by hand and then transferred to a basic notation software capable of outputting it as a midi file.

Parodites wrote:Indeed I was referring to the fugue as a discipline, accepting of course there are exceptions to my comment about fugues having relatively weak melodies. A more general statement could be made: the melody is used only as a tool for exploring the process of process itself, the process of composition itself, in the fugue, whereas the melody is at the center stage in a Romantic era work for example, or modern music.

Thank you for clarifying. I believe that melody is more than a tool - it is (to use an analogy) the DNA from which a piece may be crafted. With an exquisite melody, in the right hands, an exquisite work may result. Thus the melody is a demonstration of the art of the creator, but surely that art is the melody itself? Therefore to term the melody as 'only a tool' is surely no different to saying that the blacksmith who produced the perfect iron rose, or the most beautiful sword only used a hammer? Does this say more about the hammer or the blacksmith? I interpret what you are saying as that it may say more about the blacksmith (correct me if I am wrong) and the hammer is just a tool - and in that sense I cannot disagree with you. Yet, a hammer is a fixed shape, a melody is not - so there must be something different about a melody. Could the melody not be the result of the art, not the tool used to create it.

Parodites wrote:Aware of its challenging nature, I believe that with some explanation and repeated listening, like all work that was once new and challenging, it will become exponentially easier to intuit connections that are very obvious to me, not because of any superiority of intellect, but simply because I had to listen to these 100 times over while revising them.

I understand. Have you considered that if you take almost any possible sound, or sequence of sounds, (even a random sequence of notes) and listen to them 100 times then after that time you will appreciate them in a way you did not before?

Does this not logically mean that the way we are wired as humans means that we adapt to our surroundings, including 'coming to terms' with a random noise in the background?

Surely then, the corollary would be that to create good music is to tap into something that shortcuts that process and engages the listener in fewer listenings?

I do not judge you or your work saying this - I am merely posing the question.

Parodites wrote:It was written by hand and then transferred to a basic notation software capable of outputting it as a midi file.

And this is incredible. My compliments (though, as I alluded to before, I don't think you require them) on the achievement. Please accept my recognition (and resulting appreciation) of the fact that you did it this way.

"Surely then, the corollary would be that to create good music is to tap into something that shortcuts that process and engages the listener in fewer listenings?"

Indeed, though most composers/artists that I enjoy now, I was at first only perplexed by, and could not actually appreciate it musically. Scriabin for example just sounded like static to me, at least the sonatas, but after awhile I began to appreciate how he makes harmonic rhythm crawl to a near stop, his peculiarities with harmonic motion, etc. and then I began to "get" it.

Parodites wrote:"Surely then, the corollary would be that to create good music is to tap into something that shortcuts that process and engages the listener in fewer listenings?"

Indeed, though most composers/artists that I enjoy now, I was at first only perplexed by, and could not actually appreciate it musically. Scriabin for example just sounded like static to me, at least the sonatas, but after awhile I began to appreciate how he makes harmonic rhythm crawl to a near stop, his peculiarities with harmonic motion, etc. and then I began to "get" it.

It is interesting you say this. Scriabin is not for everyone's taste of course, but I cannot imagine his sonatas as sounding like static to anybody, even if they did not like them. They have structure, melody and harmony all of which are easily distinguishable, if not loved, by all.

I seek not to argue with you (this is something that I should convey strongly as we are communicating in text, which is a hideously limited medium) - I'm only trying to understand your perspective.

There is something very 'deep' and elusive but which requires appreciation, about your work. If you use Scriabin as a measure for something which takes multiple listenings to begin to understand/hear, how do you compare that to your own works?

I think I'm trying to understand the 'bridge' that joins conventional, even progressive, classical works to your music. I would have put your music in a category of its own, and not a bad one! Direct comparisons to classical music as we know it do not hold up well for me, but that in no way denigrates from the ground your work holds.

By static I meant, random, directionless. Unfortunately, most people would describe the late Scriabin in those terms, though he has thankfully been restored to high regard in more musically literate circles.

The reason, I think, is that there is a gap between apprehending a form through cognition and intuiting that form or structure auditorily, with our musical sense. The form, if it is unfamiliar or challenging, must be fully grasped at the cognitive level, and a person jumping in expecting to capture it with their ears immediately is thrown off, and is thereafter all the more unwilling to try to complete that first task.

Parodites wrote:By static I meant, random, directionless. Unfortunately, most people would describe the late Scriabin in those terms, though he has thankfully be restored to high regard in more musically literate circles.

Ahh, now I understand what you meant - again thank you for the clarification.

Parodites wrote:The reason, I think, is that there is a gap between apprehending a form through cognition and intuiting that form or structure auditorily, with our musical sense. The form, if it is unfamiliar or challenging, must be fully grasped at the cognitive level, and a person jumping in expecting to capture it with their ears immediately is thrown off, and is thereafter all the more unwilling to try to complete that first task.

Sure - but is that a bad thing? Or just an indication of our hard-wired human nature? I'd refer back to my previous observation, in that if you listen to anything 100 times you adapt to it. Does that imbibe 'it' with any special qualities?

Its structure is extremely clear, and in general nearly all my music is equally defined. That is why I believe what I said about aligning the cognitive and intuitive grasp of form being necessary for "new" styles of music, is true.

You might be able to make sound seem pleasing through repetition, but it will never possess definite structure like that does, as structure/symmetry is an objective, not subjective feature.

Its structure is extremely clear, and in general nearly all my music is equally defined. That is why I believe what I said about aligning the cognitive and intuitive grasp of form being necessary for "new" styles of music, is true.

You might be able to make sound seem pleasing through repetition, but it will never possess definite structure like that does, as structure/symmetry is an objective, not subjective feature.

i agree that structure/symmetry is objective. I'm going to ask another question though:

Just because something has a structure and/or symmetry when visualised in synthesia (or by any other means) does it make for good music?

Surely, good music is subjective by its very nature. Some people may like it for its representation, some for its structure, some for the theory behind that structure.

But surely most people will define it on how it sounds to them and whether they enjoy it?

There are certainly detractors of Bach - few can criticise him on the technical construction of his work but may legitimately say he is too technical and/or mechanical for their tastes (even a Bach connoisseur must acknowledge that as a valid viewpoint) and prefer Beethoven, for example.

I don't think you can represent that metric in any meaningful scientific or diagrammatic sense.

To re-iterate - I do like your work, and I think the world is a better place for having that work in it, but I'm really struggling to identify with your logical breakdown of why I should.

Regardless of what music you create, old or new, complex or simple, etc.- some will like it and some will not. Beauty is subjective and in some sense, meaningless. It is incommunicable why one person would like something and another does not.

However, the technical aspects of its construction are communicable, it is only for that reason that I usually choose to focus on them.

There are many examples in both the world of literature and film, of works that are pretty much written to be viewed several times, they are made for repeated viewings, and it is difficult to appreciate them if one does not give them that time. [Even Dostoevsky's massive works were made to be read through a few times] Considering that my music can be said objectively to possess definite structure and self-consistency, I feel it not unreasonable to demand the same: if a film can be made to be watched multiple times, a piece of music can be made to be heard multiple times, I think.

It is from minute 33:30 to minute 35:57, it ends on this really powerful cadence (35:43---35:57) that had been stuck in my head. Powerful, no? I feel as though I could expand just that into a whole piece by itself, which is another marker for greatness in my taste, how dense the music is, its potential expansion, etc.

And then the second one is a nice melody that provides a good example of what I try to do generally, which is fuse elements of classical, romantic, and jazz simultaneously, [So it doesn't really have a "genre", I guess I am trying to create one] which I haven't really seen much of anywhere else, it is from this https://audiomack.com/song/parodites/op ... verter-com

And the sequence is at57:50----59:20 minutes

Also I wanted remind you that the Symph. No. 2, Heroic, that you singled out has a fourth movement I had to separate when I uploaded it, here: https://soundcloud.com/josephchambers/heroicmov4At around 17 minutes, it brings the work to a close with a heroic theme based on staggered chords.